Content-aware encoding of cloud gaming

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Cloud gaming is a large, and rapidly growing multibillion-dollar industry. Cloud gaming enables users to play**games on thin clients such as tablets, smartphones, and smart TVs without worrying about processing power,**memory size, graphics card capabilities, and installing/updating software. Thus, high-quality games can be**played virtually on any device, anywhere, without the need for high-end gaming consoles. This significantly**increases the potential number of users and thus the market size. Cloud gaming essentially moves the game**logic and rendering from the user's device to the cloud. As a result, the entire game runs on the cloud and the**rendered scenes are then streamed to users in real-time. Rendering and streaming from the cloud, however,**substantially increase the required bandwidth to serve gaming clients. Moreover, given the large-scale and**heterogeneity of clients, numerous streams need to be created and served from the cloud in real time. This**creates a major challenge for cloud gaming providers. Thus, minimizing the resources needed to render,**encode, customize, and deliver gaming streams to millions of users is an important problem. This problem gets**even more complex when we consider advanced and next-generation games such as 3D and immersive**augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) games, which are getting popular. Our industrial partner, AMD (Advanced**Micro Devices), is a major stakeholder in the gaming industry. AMD provides advanced hardware to gaming**providers, such as the AMD Radeon Sky Series Graphics Cards, as well as software tools, such as the AMD**RapidFire Software Development Kit (SDK. The RapidFire SDK facilitates the control of the video encoder on**the Radeon Sky graphics cards to concurrently encode multiple streams at different quality configurations (e.g.,**resolutions and frame rates). An important problem for AMD is to develop methods to adaptively control the**various parameters of the on-board video encoder to minimize the required network bandwidth while**delivering the highest possible quality to heterogeneous clients, which is the focus of this project.